Thanks for the review. I've been thinking of getting an SSD, and I've always considered caching to be the solution I want. Unfortunately it always comes at a price premium, so I was never sure whether I want an SSD or a cache. FancyCache offers a partial solution, but it's not yet mature enough.

Crucial's product looks like it could be a decent solution, since the price premium isn't that big (it costs only $100 at Newegg). I only browsed the review until now but I will read it more fully to see if it's really what I'm after.

I don't understand one aspect of the test. What hard drive was this paired with? A real-world test would be whether you could have a system with this plus a huge, slow, inexpensive hard drive and get decent performance, versus hard drive alone, or a larger-capacity SSD as a boot c: drive for OS and programs, paired with a huge hard drive for storage. A raptor is fast, but expensive.

If you are on a small budget I can see this product being a good option. However will all the restrictions if you can afford to spend alittle abit more you are better off with a SSD and not this hybrid stuff.

Great review. Confirming here...from a connectivity standpoint, this is a device on a different SATA channel. The software handles data movement between primary/standard HD and secondary/SSD. At first when I saw the title I was thinking this was daisy chained in with the standard HD, but I can't see that as possible.

@Row1, (Updated) Steve paired the Adrenaline to a standard 7200rpm hard drive (Western Digital RE4 1TB HDD), you can also compare baseline performance vs. SSD cache performance since we tested the HDD alone and then with the Adrenaline installed in 1 and 3 passes.

As for other comments, on the review we are accounting for the possibility that going straight with SSD is definitely the speedier and more costly solution, that's why we test along the current SSD leaders.

For the same kind of money, you can get a 64GB SSD (basically the same as this drive) but to function as a primary drive vs. a cache drive that let's you use your larger disk drive as primary. Ultimately the choice is in your hands, but we like to show you the different alternatives

Hmm, doesn't seem to be worth the cost, as you're basically paying for a regular SSD, but not using it as a regular SSD, so you don't get all the benefits. If I had the choice, I'd just get a regular SSD and using it as the OS drive, like Albert mentioned above. They're still too pricey for me though, and I don't fancy going through all the trouble of cloning my Windows 7 installation to an SSD, especially as it's currently on a 1TB HDD that's full up, so I'd probably have to shell out for a new HDD to put all the non-Windows stuff on, plus I bet I'd have to reinstall everything again.

Probably better to just do a new build and start off with an SSD, but when the time comes for me to want to actually build a new PC, SSDs will probably be as cheap and as big as HDDs (read, many years from now)!

This is nothing new though. The OCZ Synapse caching SSD has been out for months, and it uses the same software (Dataplex). From my experience, it works REALLY well -- you just got to see it to believe it. It's only useful if you're going to pair it with a really large HDD though, and you have a definite need for frequently accessed data that cannot fit into one large SSD.

Also, as far as Dataplex is concerned, you can easily deactivate it within the program. If you have issues, at least for OCZ, they'd be happy to help you out if you forgot to deactivate it the previous time. Never had experience with Crucial though.

I just set up the Corsair Accelerator SSD cache solution on my older computer paired with a VelociRaptor and I have to say it is awesome. I didn't want to rebuild my computer to accommodate a lower sized SSD drive and the setup was simple. My motherboard only works up to SATAII which is what the Corair is. $100 for a 60GB SSD cache and minimal work needed. Well worth the price for a simple but incredible effective upgrade.

Have checked reviews of the OCZ Synapse solution and also read some in OCZ forums.
There seems to be some problems with the DATAPLEX software if you run Windows update, install new drivers etc and it could depend on how HDD and SSD Cache works together...

So at the moment this SSD Cache solution seems not quite finished yet....

The review spent some time discussing the OCZ RevoDrive problems with this software and how they don't appear in this solution. So first of all, read the review, and secondly don't just the current state of a piece of software based on old reviews.

What I'm wondering is if this solution reduces the HDD access. Meaning; if there is a cache hit (dataplex knows it is on the SSD), does that mean my harddisk can stay in standby?
But once there is a cache miss, that means the HDD in standby needs to spin up again. That takes several seconds.
Has this aspect been tested? i.e.:
(1) does using the adrenaline reduce total powerdraw over the length of the trace, meaning the boosted HDD is accessed less?
(2) what behaviour is noticed when there is a cache miss?

OK ET3D, so we don't judge a new product by old reviews - but what is the answer now? Do you have to turn off Windows auto-updates or not? The review doesn't say they ran it long enough for that to be tested.

i've used that on a z68 board with an i3, compared to the same chip used in a different board after several restarts I couldn't tell the difference between and a cruical m4 256gb drive.

also when the drive failed (ocz driverequred firmware update, I know, Surpsising!) no data was lost on the harddrive, totally transparent, it was as if it never against, after firmware update worked flawlessly